[Science & technology] – Page 4 – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

And the actual 1928 version…

This, incidentally, is the magazine cover I said in the previous post that I thought I’d posted but apparently hadn’t:

Radio News, November 1928, Hugo Gernsback (the man behind Experimenter Publishing, father of “scientifiction” and cheap bastard—though I do suspect Lovecraft’s antipathy for him was not just down to the tightness of his fists) sits watching one of his TV’s station’s broadcasts. Quite interesting looking at this after the one we were just looking at; the previous picture is like a fantasy of what television might be like, whereas this is the reality of it by the end of 1928. What strikes me most obviously is the smallness of the screen on this thing compared to the size of the overall unit… I know that early TV screens were miniscule because the limitations of mechanical TV meant it could only produce very small pictures, and I actually have my own photo of a 1930 Baird Televisor from York Castle Museum, but I don’t have that scanned that I know of so I’ll make do with this photo of JLB with his own set:

You may observe just how small the screen on that thing is, which was the thing that struck me that time I got to see one in the flesh. What strikes me, though, about the illustrated one above is that the screen looks even smaller in proportion to the overall unit… also that the latter is noticeably undecorated otherwise, all it has is the screen and the bits I gather you plugged into the radio, and otherwise it’s just this… brown block. I’m assuming the box is as big as it is to accommodate the scanning disc, but it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing bit of tech, is it? The Baird model’s quite nice by comparison.

The wonderful world of television

I could’ve sworn that, some time ago, I posted an old 1920s magazine cover about television that I found quite interesting, but it appears I have done nothing of the sort and I can only assume I did this on my old Tumblr. Anyway, never mind that cos here’s another one I’ve found via Pulp Librarian:

I am, obviously, somewhat struck by the shape of the screen on this thing; apart from being a bit ovoid, it’s also notably somewhat widescreen. I find this quite remarkable, given this wasn’t even really a thing in cinema yet; there’d been experiments with wider images than the 1.33:1 standard going back to the Corbett & Fitzsimmons fight in 1897, and the year this was apparently published (1927) Abel Gance had just unleashed Polyvision, and in the couple of years following there would be a handful of other attempts. But it was hardly a common industry practice, so I’m not sure why our cover artist here was envisaging wider-screen TV… I mean, when Hollywood started going widescreen in the 50s it was in competition with the rising popularity of TV, whereas in 1927 it wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort. The sort of thing that only puzzles me, I’m sure, but there you go.

I wonder, too, if our artist was envisaging sound as part of the package, which would’ve been REALLY forward-looking. In 1927, of course, sound was yet to become the film industry revolution it soon would be—like widescreen, it had only really been limited and experimental—so I’m wondering if the artist envisaged that thing at the top of the screen as a speaker. As it happens, Experimenter Publishing, who published this thing, also had a radio station which, in 1928, started doing experimental TV broadcasts as well using their radio frequency, but they broadcast silent TV, so if that is supposed to be a speaker it was way ahead of the publisher’s own reality (TV with sound would be a thing not long after, apparently). Anyway, just found that kind of pleasing on a sort of retro-futurist level; I suppose just showing a TV of any sort was kind of futuristic in 1927…

Well that was unexpected

Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip

I was sceptical a few months ago when the story of Oolong’s first Neuralink chip started circulating, but I suppose if they’re admitting something’s wrong with it then it actually did happen after all…

The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant’s brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.
It’s unclear what caused the threads to become “retracted” from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

If I’m reading the story correctly, they seem to be mostly worried that the chip isns’t transferring data fast enough to actually be useful in moving cursors on a screen and that sort of thing. I suppose the thinking is “the guy was already a paraplegic so it’s not like we could fuck him up any further”… I mean, it wasn’t a CybertrucKKK they were putting in his brain…

Something I only noticed tonight

And I suspect I’m not the first and therefore this is not an original insight (few if any of my “insights” are), but you know how vertical video has been a thing since Vine, and now lives on as Instagram reels, Tiktok, Youtube shorts and whatever else? For some reason it struck me tonight that it goes back a lot further than that…

…And I mean RIGHT BACK to the invention of television. That there is John Logie Baird with one of his televisors. You might notice the shape of the screen. Vertical.

And that’s from one of Baird’s Phonovision discs, so you can see the picture it recorded was indeed upright (aspect ratio of 7:3, apparently). I wonder why Baird went for this rather than a squarer format like cinema (and isn’t it interesting, too, that even when Baird was experimenting with TV, cinema had long been experimenting with going wide rather than tall). I don’t know why this only hit me tonight, I can’t remember what pages I might’ve been looking at on the Interwebs that made me have this sudden realisation, but there you go, vertical video has a heritage going back to the 1920s. So if, like me, you’re not actually a fan of vertical video, well, sorry…

How about that eclipse, then

Alas, the end times appear to have been a bit of a disappointment again, with no reports that I can see of people rising into the sky en masse or that mass human sacrifice someone was predicting, or the serial earthquakes the northeast US was supposed to get according to some others… I suppose we’ve still got a few days before the red heifer thing works out. Needless to say, though, the idiots have still been out in force online; on Youtube they’ve mostly manifested as astrologers, who I’m sure are harmless, but there was a ton of religious cranks (Muslim ones, not just Christians) who I’m a lot less sure of. And then there was this guy:

No reason not to use a common astronomical event to whip up a bit of Islamophobia, eh? Always the way with these far-right American pastors…

…Oh, he’s Australian? Fuck. Well, be honest, you would’ve expected him to be American too with the amount of bullshit his channel has about American politics. Though by that logic, you’d probably think I was American too or something… Anyway, Steve was born into “a family of Buddhists, Catholics, Methodists, and Muslims” and came away from it with the worst aspects of all of them, by the look of it. I’m sure him and Danny Nalliah would be great mates.

Still, this struck me as egregious even by comparison:

Um… no? I watched a bit of the video itself which is a lot more vague about things than this thumbnail for it might indicate, but I’m fairly sure that the fact that Crowley claimed to have started channelling Liber AL on April 8th 1904 and the fact that there was a solar eclipse on the same date 120 years years are entirely unrelated. I mean, Crowley himself attached so little importance to the book that he actually lost the manuscript for a few years, so I don’t think he would’ve attached any importance to the date coincidence either…

Anyway, the eclipse happened and people were excited, weather seems to have been good for most places, and I’ve seen a bunch of great photos of it online:

Ganked from the Graun, that was the view from Toronto. The Sun itself put on a good show before the Moon moved on; someone in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group posted this photo they got:

…And then noted that the solar prominence you can see at the bottom is the size of the Earth.

FUCK.

See, I find that sufficiently head-spinning without having to a bunch of religious bullshit about the end of the world and all that. (And what about the other countries that got to see the eclipse? Does God have a separate judgement for Mexico and Canada? What about all the other countries on Earth that saw nothing, are we off the hook?) The spectacle was more than enough, especially for some of the people I saw on YT having a moment together in news videos of it getting darker and darker. Celestial mechanics can be damned pretty to look at. And however cheesy it may be, I think the message of this song is basically correct and I fucking love it:

Now I think about it, though, I can imagine some dickhead might look at that and think “Apoptygma Berzerk… wait, Apop sounds like Apep, and APEP is the name of that rocket thing NASA was doing during the eclipse, and don’t they have an album called Rocket Science too? Apop… Apep… Stephan Groth is the Antichrist?!” If people can believe some of the shit I’ve seen lately, someone can believe that, I’m sure…

Anyway, so much for the apocalypse, I suppose. We’re due to get a total solar eclipse in 2028 that’ll actually be visible here in Sydney, so I suppose that’ll be something to get excited about, cos according to Wiki the last one we got here was in 1857 and the next one won’t be visible until 2858. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be around for that. Somehow I also suspect the weather on that day in 2028 will also be shit and no one will see anything…

Climbing Mount Insufferable

As someone who’s not entirely science-illiterate but still not a lot better than that, I value scientists who do know what they’re doing in their field (especially if they’re good at making me understand it at least slightly). And then sometimes you wish they’d have stuck to their field instead of branching out into areas they probably shouldn’t have gone near…

…like Richard Dawkins branching out into political issues. I would consider his atheist activism as part of that political activity, including his advocacy for the Smugs… sorry, the Brights, and the results of that haven’t always been pretty, but his further problems with trans people have been even less so. And…

Look, I’m no scientician so I don’t know how fair or accurate this claim is, and I’m not always the best at logic either… but even I can tell this is bullshit. Rarity and non-existence are NOT the same thing, Richard. 99 out of a hundred people may well be “unambiguous males and females”, but the other one still exists. Maybe 0.018% is statistically insignificant if you want to call it that, but that 0.018% is still real. (Indeed, going by the current US population, that amounts to a bit over six million people who actually exist as intersex.) They’re the blip that stops the binary from being 100% absolute. The genetic mutations that eventually produced Homo sapiens, and which separated us out from, say, the Denisovans or the Neanderthals, would’ve been similar blips, therefore by Dawkins’ logic above they don’t count and so evolution didn’t happen and he himself doesn’t exist…?

But such coverage as I’ve seen of this stuff on social media hasn’t mentioned the second tweet, which I think is key to what he’s actually trying to say… I mean, the quotation marks around “existence” are kind of telling in themselves, but even though he says all this is “irrelevant” to trans people, I feel on some level it’s actually all about them, really, cos the worldwide population of trans folk is about the same as that of intersex folk, probably a bit more so but generally considered somewhere between 0.1 and 0.6% of people. Which, even at the low end of that scale, still means about 34m trans people fucking with the gender binary just in the US… and in basically trying to say intersex people don’t matter and the binary is still real, I think Dawkins was trying to covertly say that trans people don’t either.

And even if I’m reading him wrong and being uncharitable, which I quite possibly am, there’s still something weirdly mean-spirited about the entire thing. I don’t understand why this was a point he felt so strongly about making. Maybe it’s one of those “secular Christian” or “cultural Anglican” thing. I used to think Lalla Ward was kind of callous divorcing him in the same year he had that stroke, but now I feel she had a point…

A genius

I’ll admit to having no idea how to set my own PC laptop up without the Microsoft account either, but I’m also not marketing myself and being celebrated by an unthinking cult as the world’s prime technology genius. Surprised to find such a smart man using Windows in the first place (are Mac and Linux too woke for him?)…

“What was 2024 like, grandad?”

I had to take a screenshot of this cos otherwise it would be kind of unbelievable. Still is, of course, but, well, it’s 2024 and things like this really shouldn’t surprise me any more, should they?

That’s a couple of examples I found via Twatter. Alas, the Verge article depicted above is more interested in speculating on why Gemini behaved like this than in asking why these people wanted AI-created pictures of Nazi-era German soldiers, which is what interests me more. (That, and why couldn’t they just use regular Google image search.) However, it does contain this remarkable sentence:

As the Daily Dot chronicles, the controversy has been promoted largely — though not exclusively — by right-wing figures attacking a tech company that’s perceived as liberal.

Google. Liberal. The company that was going to make a special version of its search engine just for China that would refuse to find sites about things like human rights, democracy, etc. That’s engaged in racially based surveillance of BLM protestors for the FBI and of Palestinian people for Israel. That tried to stop its employees from unionising. That owns Youtube and is happy for far-right YT creators and overt white supremacists to make money from their hateful bullshit. That Google. Liberal. The Right really is detached from reality…

And in Oolong news…

You remember Neuralink, don’t you? You remember the 1500 animals that died in the course of experimenting on them? Well, as you may see above, Oolong is now claiming to have taken the next step; I was wrong the last time I posted about this, cos I said he didn’t have FDA approval for human testing when he actually had got it a few months earlier, and he’s apparently acted on that at last.

I say “apparently” because, well, this tweet appears to be the only evidence of it happening at all. Neuralink’s own Twitter account is conspicuously free of any statement on the subject, the “recipient” hasn’t been identified, and I’m just perplexed by the absence of hype. This tweet has been, you know, it. Kind of weird that people are just accepting this story on the face of it without, you know, evidence, though I have seen a few people wondering what Elon might be trying to distract us from with this amazing news, and someone may have found out:

“Unacceptable migration of contaminated ground water is present” is quite a way of putting it. Tesla’s fuckup is, as far as I can see, getting rather less coverage than Musk’s putative neurosurgery success, but maybe it just needs more time to circulate. Either way, if this operation did happen, and I somehow feel it didn’t, I hope the proud owner of a new brain chip has a happier ending than Oolong’s monkeys…

Parenthetically, one of the responders to the Brian Tyler Cohen tweet I posted at the start of this made some snide remark about how at least Elon admits he wants to microchip you. Which is not an entirely bad point, but, really, if you’re going to be like that about it, one might further add the reason why Bill Gates doesn’t tell you about microchipping is that HE ISN’T DOING THAT TO YOU. Fucking paranoids, man…

120 years of Wright flight

Because I’m in Australia, it means I’m almost always technically a day behind big anniversaries in the US, and accordingly I am a day late with the 120th anniversary of this photo. The Kitty Hawk Flyer may have only been airborne for 12 seconds on December 17, 1903, but that was all it needed to transform the world.